


Still Bleeding

by DetectiveJoan



Category: The Bright Sessions (Podcast)
Genre: Boys In Love, Canon Gay Character, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Mild Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-20 21:31:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17030388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DetectiveJoan/pseuds/DetectiveJoan
Summary: Adam Hayes is kind of an idiot.





	Still Bleeding

**Author's Note:**

  * For [blue_spruce](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blue_spruce/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, ya'll! Huge thank you to blue_spruce for giving me an excuse to root around in Adam's brain, and to karanguni for an amazing last minute beta <3 
> 
> This takes place sometime around season four, but with a very hand-wavy approach to that whole part of canon.
> 
>  **Content warnings** for mild sexual content involving teenage characters, and canon-typical references to self-harm and hospitalization, medical/military human experimentation, war, and PTSD.

Adam Hayes is kind of an idiot.

At the top of the evidence list is the fact that he spent two entire years crushing on Caleb without ever once considering that Caleb might like him back. Heck, he never even considered that Caleb could be gay—or bi or queer or whatever.

Well, of course Adam had _considered_ the possibility, but that was only in vague daydreams of Caleb buying him a dozen roses, or asking him to prom in a big production in the middle of the cafeteria, or (when Adam really shut off his reality filter) stealthily pulling him into that perpetually unlocked custodial closet in the math hall for a quickie between classes. None of that had prepared him for the reality that turned out to be a Snapstreak of good morning texts, and casual kisses in the school parking lot, and holding hands on the way to English.

When they’re alone, listening to music or doing homework on the floor in Adam’s bedroom (with the door open because of a house rule that Adam’s finally learning to resent), Caleb sometimes leans in close, catches Adam’s face in both of his hands, and then flutters butterfly kisses against his cheek until it tickles enough to make Adam squirm away and beg him to stop.

“Why do you do that?” Adam asks one day through the last of his laughter.

Caleb shrugs. “I dunno. It makes you happy.”

“What, and you just like doing anything that makes me happy?” Adam teases.

To his surprise, Caleb’s neck flushes. “Uh, yeah?” he says. “Your happiness feels really nice.”

Adam’s heart immediately goes soft; Caleb sort of rolls his eyes, but his blush gets deeper. “Okay, Adam, you don’t have to be all mushy about it. I just meant, like—”

Adam cuts him off with a kiss, and Caleb falls into it willingly. He brings his hands back up to Adam’s face, and pulls him in closer and closer until Adam can steel his nerves and swing one of his legs over so he’s straddling Caleb’s lap.

It’s beyond risky, with the door open and his parents downstairs, but Adam can’t resist the chance to set his hands on Caleb’s waist and then roll his own hips down, grinding against his boyfriend until he moans.

Adam breaks off the kiss to frantically shush him. Caleb laughs and drops one hand to tap on the center of Adam’s chest, where something that feels fizzy and bright and warm is building up.

“I want to make you feel that,” Caleb says, “all the time.”

Adam leans forward until his forehead is resting against Caleb’s, and closes his eyes. He feels happy, sure, but sitting like this with Caleb pinned under him also makes him feel….powerful. And in control.

Caleb flutters his eyelashes again and it tickles against Adam’s nose. He can’t suppress another smile.

“You like me,” Adam accuses.

“I like you a lot,” Caleb says. “I kind of thought that was obvious.”

 

/ / /

 

Part of the problem might be just that Caleb is so damn much more perceptive than Adam is.

“Oh, it’s guilt,” Caleb declares like an answer to a question that no one's asked after Frank excuses himself in the middle of atypical board game night for the third month in a row.

No one pays him any attention. Adam’s busy watching Frank give Chloe an apologetic “this empathy shit is eating me alive” look on his way out the door. Mark has an arm around Sam’s shoulder, and he squeezes it reassuringly as she exchanges a worried glance with Dr. Bright.

“Will you—?” Chloe says in Mark’s general direction.

“On it,” he responds immediately. He gets up and follows Frank out the front door.

Caleb nudges Adam with his elbow. “It’s guilt,” he says again.

“What?” Adam hadn’t really been listening. “Who? Frank—”

“No, you,” Chloe corrects firmly.

Adam frowns.

“That hollow blue-gray thing you feel whenever you see Frank or Mark get upset? Like your ribs are caving in?” Caleb clarifies. “It’s guilt. You feel guilty.”

Adam crosses his arms over his chest like that’ll stop Caleb from seeing straight through him. “That’s dumb,” he says. “I’m not hurting them. Why would I feel guilty?”

“Because guilt’s the stupidest emotion,” Sam says distractedly. She’s looking at the window even though it’s too dark outside to see anything.

“Samantha,” Dr. Bright says in her chiding therapist voice.

She’s obviously about to start in on the all-emotions-are-valid speech that everyone in the room has heard at least three times by now, but Sam huffs before she can start. “Well it is!” she says defensively. “I feel guilty about stuff that isn’t my fault all the time. Adam’s right; it’s dumb.”

“Maybe part of you thinks that you are hurting them,” Chloe says. She leans forward like she wants to take Adam’s hand, but he doesn’t bite. “Just because emotions don’t make sense on the surface doesn’t mean they aren’t coming from somewhere.”

“But _no one’s_ hurting them,” he insists. “I mean, not deliberately. Right? They just get overwhelmed sometimes because their abilities are hard to control, but that’s not anyone’s fault.”

The alternative—that there’s something Adam should be doing to mute his thoughts or his emotions but that he hasn’t figured out, that he’s inadvertently causing them pain—isn’t something he wants to dwell on.

“It’s kind of the AM’s fault,” Caleb mutters.

“I don’t exactly see Wadsworth feeling guilty about it,” Sam points out, but then she catches the look on Dr. Bright’s face and the conversation abruptly ends.

 

/ / /

 

Another notable item on Adam’s list of stupidity is that he never figured out his parents were involved in top secret super soldier experiments. Or super marine experiments. Again, whatever. He’s less concerned with the terminology than with the general fact that his parents poked around in the brains of some random humans until they grew superpowers, and Adam had never known a thing about it.

He tries to cut himself a little bit of slack on this one, since most kids his age probably don’t know that many details about all the specific projects their parents have worked on over the years. Honestly, even if he’d ever managed to put this one together on his own, he wouldn’t have believed his own suspicions without Frank around to be living, breathing proof that Adam’s whole life has somehow fallen sideways into a comic book cliche.

Adam finds out about the experiments in bits and pieces. Caleb whispers gossip cobbled from empathy and eavesdropping, and Chloe spills hints without context in the middle of her word-vomit-mind-reading monologues, and none of it is ever coherent enough to satisfy him.

The gaps in the story gnaw at him constantly. What exactly have his parents done?

What are his parents capable of doing?

He waits weeks and weeks, until his dad finally leaves his keyring in the basket by the door when his parents go out for dinner. Adam continues pretending to do homework for ten entire minutes just to make sure they’re really gone before seizing his opportunity.

He lets himself into their home office, and goes straight to the filing cabinet against the south wall.

When Adam was nine years old, he’d asked his dad why he kept some of his papers locked up. He’d received a short answer about doctor-patient confidentiality, followed by a longer lecture about how sometimes being responsible meant keeping secrets.

For a long time, it had been a memory that had curled tightly in Adam’s gut whenever he’d thought about the razor blade hidden between his mattress and boxspring, or about the webs of thin scars he’d learned how to carve into his own skin.

The bottom drawer of the cabinet isn’t locked anymore; it’s mostly full of Adam’s emergency room intake forms and outpatient treatment records and therapist recommendations and insurance bills and notes from their family counseling sessions and a lot of other paperwork he’d rather not think about.

He fumbles with the keyring until he manages to unlock the top drawer, skims the file tabs just enough to figure out they’re in alphabetical order, and then skips down to the third drawer. Tucked neatly behind _Romero_ is a file that’s been censored with a thick black marker.

S----, F.

Adam pulls it out. He grabs every other censored file he sees for good measure, and goes downstairs to spread it all out on the dining room table. He leaves the keys in the lock.

The paperwork is censored all the way through, and half of what’s left is so full of jargon that Adam can’t make heads or tails of it. There are plenty of references to a Director W-------- that must mean Annabelle. Seeing the formal title makes his jaw clench.

Eventually he figures out that he can use the military reports to help decode the language in the medical reports and vice versa.

He doesn’t know enough to tell whether or not the science is sound, but it looks like it had been tested pretty thoroughly prior to the human trials. Annabelle’s name is all over the initial project proposal. His mom had been more heavily involved in selecting the subjects, making sure that the Marines chosen were both willing volunteers and were the most likely to respond well to the procedures. His dad’s name shows up mostly in the follow-up testing, which not only thoroughly checked the strength and limits of the artificial empathy, but also checked on each volunteer’s physical and mental health. Every file has several pages of notes dedicated solely to making sure no real harm had been done.

Obviously something had gone drastically wrong between when Frank’s procedure was signed off on as successful and when Adam had met him, but it doesn’t look like there’s room to blame his parents for that.

He focuses on relaxing the muscles in his shoulders. He unclenches his hands and places both palms flat on the table. He takes a deep breath.

His parents are okay.

They’re still good people.

They didn’t mean to hurt anyone, and they did everything they could to avoid it.

Apparently the Geneva violations at the AM that Mark and Dr. Bright sometimes mention when they forget that Adam’s in the room are Annabelle’s alone.

 

/ / /

 

Frank shows up on his doorstep one afternoon when Adam is starting on his fourth cookie batter batch of not thinking about it.

“Hello, Adam,” he says. His smile is warm.

“I—hey,” Adam says, rubbing his palms against the front of his apron. There’s flour on his elbows, but nothing he can do about it now. “My parents aren’t home. I mean—do you want to come in? I have cookies, if you want.”

“I’d like that,” Frank says in his deep voice that always reminds Adam to take a breath and slow down. He steps out of his boots by the door and follows Adam through to the kitchen.

Adam pours two glasses of milk because it seems like the thing to do. Frank takes a seat at one of the barstools.

“You didn’t come to talk to my parents, did you?” Adam asks when he pushes the first glass to Frank.

“No.”

“Okay.”

Adam carefully breaks off a piece of cookie and shoves it into his mouth so he won’t have to talk first.  

“Chloe mentioned that you might have been uncomfortable with what happened the last time you and I saw each other,” Frank says. “I wanted to check in, make sure I hadn’t done something to upset you.”

“You didn’t,” Adam responds too quickly around a full mouth.

“But?” Frank prompts.

Adam swallows and shifts his weight. “Caleb says that I feel guilty. About, um, everything that happened to you. With my parents, and all.”

Frank presses his lips together. “I suppose Caleb would know better than I would,” he says eventually. “That boy does seem to have a special radar just for your emotions.”

“I suppose,” Adam echoes.

“But you know that what really happened to me was war, Adam. It’s certainly not your fault.”

“No, I know.” Adam presses his finger down to pick up some crumbs from the counter. “But I still feel like I should’ve known about the AM and atypicals and the experiments and everything. It’s like, maybe if I had been a bit smarter and paid more attention I could’ve done something.”

Frank puts his chin in one hand, and studies Adam carefully.

“You want to know what I think?” he says finally.

“Sure.”

“I think you’re only seventeen. I think you’re absolutely going to change the world someday, but it’s going to take some time and you have to be patient. And if you’ll pardon the language, I think this is the time of your life when you’re supposed to be doing dumb shit.”

Adam raises his eyebrows skeptically. “You want me to be stupider.”

“I want you to have fun,” Frank corrects. “Try not to worry so much about the rest of it.”

 

/ / /

 

Caleb is waiting when Adam’s bus pulls up Monday morning, half-leaning against a bike rack and scrolling through his phone absentmindedly.

“What are you so nervous about?” he asks as soon as Adam’s feet hit the cement.

Adam grabs Caleb’s free hand and tugs him toward the front doors. “We’re skipping homeroom today,” he says.

“We are?” Caleb sounds surprised. “What happened to Mr. Five Years of Perfect Attendance?”

“He’s been temporarily replaced by Mr. Wants To Have Fun Doing Dumb Shit With His Boyfriend,” Adam replies.

Caleb tilts his head. “What kind of dumb shit?”

Adam shrugs with fake nonchalance like Caleb can’t feel how fast his heart is already beating. “Well, I was thinking we could start by making out in a dark closet, and then see where things go from there. You interested?”


End file.
